The video begins with a forested scene and a mountain in the background. Birds are chirping. The Forest Service logo and the words “Shasta-Trinity National Forest Presents” appear. This fades to another forested environment with a view of a right of way showing a power line tower. Text appears that says “Energy from the National Forest.” The birds are still chirping.

The view changes to show a forested environment with the smoke from a wild fire in the distance. The narrator says “Another wildfire burns in northern California releasing carbon the trees removed from the atmosphere as they grew. Wildfires have become more intense and destructive due to decades of aggressive suppression allowing fuels to accumulate. A partnership between the US Forest Service and private industry is removing excess biomass from the national forests and using it to generate electricity resulting in a healthier forest and less reliance on fossil fuel.”

The view changes to a forested environment where the trees have been thinned. Mike Hupp, former District Ranger for the Shasta McCloud Management Unit is there and says “This is part of Mountain Thin and it’s a commercial thinning project that the Forest Service did right next to the town of Mt. Shasta; and the goal in this project was to reduce the probability of a high intensity fire right at the edge of town; and we did that by removing the biomass, the small trees, the ladder fuels that go from the forest floor up into the canopy and also by thinning the stand so that it more closely resembles the natural stand density that you might have had in this environment.” As Mike talked, the view changed to show to photos. One is of an unthinned forest with a lot of small trees and brush. The other shows a thinned forest where the small trees and some of the underbrush has been removed.

The view changes to another forested environment where Bob Allen, Fuels Manager for Burney Forest Power says “What we’re doing here is we’re thinning the forest. We’re taking the understory out. We’re controlling the stocking density or the number of trees per acre. We’re taking the ladder fuel out of the forest so that if there is a fire, the fire will not crown and it’ll be a cool, low flame heights, so they can take a frontal attack, control the fire very easily. By thinning the forest, we also giving more water and food to the residual trees, or the leave trees so that they’ll grow healthy, faster and stronger and so we have a much stronger, healthier forest.” As Bob talked, the view changed to show equipment that can cut and carry a tree without it falling down.

The view changed to show Mike Hupp standing on the edge of a large pile of woody debris. As the camera pulls back, Mike says “I’m standing in one of the landings of the Mt. Thin timber sale right at the edge of Mt. Shasta. This is one of the biomass piles. So these are all limbs and tops and small trees that we remove from the forest and are going to chip for fuel and there are probably, approximately 70 van loads of chips here at this landing. That’s about 2800 barrels of oil if you convert that to BTUs.”

The view changes to an active timber sale operation. Mike Hupp is there and says “We’re on the Baby Powder timber sale here and what we’re looking at is a biomass chipping operation and what we’re doing is removing small trees and chipping those and sending the chips to a power plant where they’re burned for electricity. Every bone dry ton of chips that we remove has the equivalent energy of about three barrels of oil and when you look at one of these chip vans back here, when they’re fully loaded, they hold about 13 bone dry tons of chips. So every time you see one of these van loads going down the road, it’s got the energy equivalent in it of about 39 barrels of oil. Since 1994, we’ve removed over 300,000 bone dry tons of chips from this landscape. That’s the equivalent of nearly a million barrels of oil. Think of it as solar power in solid form.” As Mike talks, the scene changes and shows bits of the operation, such as chipping the trees and loading trucks with the chips.

The view shifts to Bob Allen standing in front of a large machine. He says “What we have here is a 31 megawatt wood fired power plant. It produces renewable energy from forest waste. Trees that are too small to make lumber and the understory that carries fire from the ground up into the crowns for a forest destroying fire. This plant is a forest managers dream because he can regulate the number of trees on each acre of land and control the species composition of that forest. As you can see, I don’t know if you can see the top of our stacks, but right now, the stacks are clean. We’re running wide open. We produce, like I said, 31 megawatts. Each truck that comes in here contains enough wood chips to produce enough electricity for 14 to 18 houses for an entire month. This facility is essentially a zero discharge facility. When it rains, we collect the runoff water in the lined ponds on site. We process that water through a water treatment plant to clean it up and we use it in our cooling tower to reconstitute the steam back to water so it can be reintroduced to the boiler and recycled again.” As he talks, the view changes to show various short segments of plant operations, such as trucks off loading their chips and the control room of the plant.

The view shifts back to a thinned forest. The narrator says “With more space between trees, the thinned forests grows faster, absorbing more carbon from the air through photosynthesis and sequestering it as wood, foliage and other biomass. The energy produced by biomass plants is considered carbon neutral because it does not require that oil be extracted from the ground and burned which adds to the total amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The project is self sustaining requiring no taxpayer dollars to be spent on thinning the forest. There is an added benefit. Reduced cost to suppress wildland fire because they have less fuel to feed on. For more information about thinning forests and forest management, contact the Shasta-Trinity National Forest or visit their website.” As the narrator talks, the view shows the Burney biomass plant and wheeled equipment cutting small trees down in the forest.

Against a background of Mt. Shasta, the credits scroll by, as follows:

Director and Editor – Bob Belongie
Camera and Logistics – Brenda Belongie
Thanks to Mike Hupp, Bob Allen, Mike Odle
Produced for Shasta-Trinity National Forest Public Affairs and Communications by Belongie Entertainment Enterprises.
The US Forest Service is an Equal Opportunity Provider and Employer.

[End of recorded material]

Energy from the National Forest - August 2008
US Forest Service
Shasta-Trinity National Forest